BK Loren

I was born prematurely. That was the end of my precociousness. I've spent my life trying to find quiet jobs that allow some psychological space where I can write in my head as I work. I've worked on a ranch, in a candy factory, in retail stores. I've built furniture, cooked under the guidance of a gourmet chef in NYC, cooked; also, in a cafe run by a reverend healer who "cured" people with a pendulum and herbs. I was an aide on a locked psych ward, a tenured college teacher, a graphic artist, a truck driver, and I still freelance as a professional brainstormer. I was grateful for the chance to go to college (it was never a given), but I also feel that these life experiences inform my writing as much as my time in the Iowa Writers' Workshop MFA program. The publishing editor of one of my books told me I wrote like I was raised by wolves. I try to live up to that daily.

**You can also read BK Loren's work in periodicals like Orion Magazine, Spirituality and Health, Three Coyotes, Yoga International, The Body-Soul Connection, Fourth River, Hawk and Handsaw, and many others. Her fiction and nonfiction have won numerous national awards and fellowships and have been nominated three times for a Pushcart Prize.